Six Myth-Driven Writing Prompts
Alfred Schwarzchild’s The Poet and His Muse is in the public domain.
If a tale has lasted for more than a thousand years, it seems reasonable to emulate it. Here are some exercises that you can use as writing prompts for your own work, for teaching in a classroom, or for thinking about different approaches to crafting narratives. I hope these will help you generate material.
Embellishing the Character
When you fiddle with the characters in an older story, you might end up going further afield and inventing more elements. For example, in Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado retells the children’s ghost story about the woman with a ribbon around her neck; in the original, all we know about the protagonist is that her head will fall off if you remove her ribbon – but Machado fills in this outline with details about sexual appetites, family, and more.
When writers change the characters in older tales, they often do so to modernize them. For example, the television show Once Upon a Time draws from fairy tales and myth to create new stories that reimagine archetypal characters living in a small town in Maine. In the series Snow White is a teacher, while Prince Charming happens to have married another woman. They eventually get to meet an older, wiser Hades who wears a suit.
"File:Marcantonio Raimondi after Raphael, Dido, NGA 638.jpg" by After Raphael is marked with CC0 1.0
Writing Exercise : Tell a new Aeneid, in which Dido is not the sort who commits suicide because her man abandoned her.
Changing the Setting of an Older Story
Some retellings of classical mythology put old characters into new settings. For example, Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson & The Olympians series imagines the Greek pantheon in modern day United States. In Gods Behaving Badly, Marie Phillips puts the same gods into a dilapidated flat in London.
Writing Exercise : Read Hindu Myths and then imagine new versions that take place in a different culture you know well. For example, in one story Parvati creates a son from earth named Ganesha and tells him to guard her while she bathes. When her husband Shiva comes home, he and his demons think Ganesha is an intruder, so they cut off his head. Parvati rushes in from her bath, too late to stop the tragedy, but she persuades Shiva to make amends. He obligingly grabs the nearest animal, an elephant, takes its head and gives that to Ganesha (for more about this story, read here.) What if the elephant god were a New York boy named Chris born to banker parents? Supposing Mom told Chris to keep an eye on the bathroom while she took a shower, and when Dad came home he was enraged?
Taking a New Point of View
"Narcissus and Echo" by Frans van der Neve is licensed under CC0 1.0
A number of excellent retellings of classical tales in recent years have written the same old sexist story we know from a new point of view. Margaret Atwood, for example, wrote about Penelope’s perspective of The Odyssey in The Penelopiad. Madeline Miller rewove tales from numerous sources about a witch in her novel Circe, which recasts the villainess as a heroine. Pat Barker’s Silence of the Girls retells the The Iliad from the perspective of Achilles’ concubine Briseis.
Writing Exercise: Write the story of Hansel and Gretel from the witch’s perspective.
Writing Exercise: Write the story of Narcissus and Echo from her perspective.
"Pygmalion" by Joachim von Sandrart is licensed under CC0 1.0
Asking What Happens After the Writer Stopped?
In the original Pygmalion, the sculptor falls in love with his statue and Venus graces him by bringing her to life. In the story Galatea, Madeline Miller considered what might have happened after this “happy” event, and it turns out Pygmalion was an obsessive and controlling husband.
Writing Exercise: Imagine Scheherazade of Tales from the Thousand and One Nights after she persuades her husband not to execute her.
Mixing Stories Together
I don’t know how Pride and Prejudice and Zombies happened, but if Seth Grahame-Smith could combine Jane Austen with Haitian folklore, it’s an open field.
Writing Exercise : If you’re looking for ideas, you could write the names of your favorite stories on pieces of paper, draw two from a paper bag, and start imagining connections.
